Saturday, October 23, 2010

[ALT: The test didn't (spoiler alert) destroy the world, but the fact that they were even doing those calculations makes theirs the coolest jobs ever.]

I'm sure every one of you who doesn't suck has watched Dr. Strangelove. The premise of the movie runs something like this: what if everyone who was supposed to prevent disaster from happening in the Cold War were crazies and incompetents? The result is one of the best absurdist comedies out there.

Much like Dr. Strangelove, this comic has a premise: what if one of the researchers on the bomb didn't know math very well? The result of this one, unfortunately, is incredibly boring. Nothing wacky happens at all! It turns out, in Randy's hypothetical scenario, that if someone researching the bomb didn't know math very well, someone else would just redo his work, and disaster would be averted.

I don't need to tell you how boring this is, but I do want to draw attention to something here: this is a hypothetical scenario. An alternate history, if you will. Randy came up with something he thought was hilariously wacky--one of the scientists sucks at math! HILARIOUS! And maybe this could be a great story. An absurdist comedy about the scientific elite.

Except even when Randy is coming up with wacky hypothetical scenarios, it's still fucking boring. Randy is unable to conceive of something amusing happening. His mind is so incredibly boring that his wacky hypotheticals end exactly the way the real world events happened: without mishap.

There's so many ways this could have been funny. Funny characters, a funny story, something funny happening. Anything. Anything besides "oh no we have to recheck our work!" Anything besides someone saying "hey I don't remember the mnemonic we were taught in high school, which one is it" and someone else saying "OMG YOU DON'T REMEMBER THE MNEMONIC YOU SUCK AT MATH LET'S REDO ALL YOUR WORK."

No, this is bullshit. The written joke itself would be decent enough if it was visually interesting. It builds up an exaggerated scenario and then deflates it with an anti-climactic twist. It's not the greatest joke ever, but it's definite humour. The only actual problem with the comic (apart perhaps from the superfluous final line) is that the artwork can't back the joke up at all, and though that recurring problem with XKCD remains as significant as ever the emphasis you chose is that of a cuntfaced shitbrain who likes to pretend he knows what he's talking about but is really just latching on to the first thing resembling criticism that his decayed little mind can find.

And whose fault is it that the artwork can't be used to make a joke? This is like saying that the fat kid in high school isn't to blame for running a mile so slowly. After all, he'd run faster if he weren't so fat.

one of the reasons I don't usually comment on the art is it's pretty much a given that the art sucks. I only comment on it if it's bad in a new, spectacular sort of way--like if it's trying to tell a visual joke (which this one isn't).

I'm not a visual artist, so that is not something I focus on.

but in the event anyone was doubting it: yes, the art is always shitty, and my previously stated position that the comic would improve drastically if Randy got a real artist still stands.

They're sitting in a bunker, all wearing goggles, while someone is counting down in the background. The caption identifies this is the trinity test. And then they have this conversation, with the count reaching zero just as Steve remarks about not being sure about his math.

For bonus points, Randall could've made the final panel a drawing of the explosion with some dashes of colour thrown in which would've had the forums gushing over what a great artist he is again.

"I don't need to tell you how boring this is, but I do want to draw attention to something here: this is a hypothetical scenario. An alternate history, if you will."

An alternate story that will just return to the usual story. Which means it's pointless.

I seriously hate the last panel of this. It could work very well if it wasn't for that huge PPD. It doesn't add anything, it kills any premise of humor in the punchline, it drags the scene longer than it needed. It's the epitome of PPD. Congratulations, Randall, you managed to unlock a new achievement in sucking!

Rob, you are too good at this, clearly. I read "Automatically lame" the first time, and "Anatomically lame" the second. One could argue that this just means I haven't been sleeping enough, but alternately your titles are filled with meanings. Or typos. Either way

810 makes perfect sense. Stickman wants to design a system that will create helpful spambots and ban stupid people.

Well, it makes sense in theory, at least. In reality, once the spambots get up to the level of stupid people, the stupid people mistake the spambots for their own and let them stay around, therefore keeping the level of annoyance constant.

So the biggest problem with this comic is that Randall is once again horribly behind the times. Also, dear God, look how horrible those heads are in panels 2 and 4. They're not even close to round.

I actually like the new one. Not really that funny or clever, but there's something sweet about it, and the punchline is decent. PPD is in the alt-text where it should be. The girl is not smarter than the guy, and yet neither is depicted as particularly stupid.

However, I can't help but shake the feeling that Randall wants to prevent people from posting negative things about his comic.

Quick answer to why Randall's idea for 810 doesn't work: People would not want to waste that much time.

Slightly longer answer: Because a lot of comments require context to understand, which the users rating them would not have. Hence, good comments wouldn't necessarily be obvious. Furthermore, at what point do the comments just show up where intended? After they're been reviewed? Wouldn't that mean that all the bad comments would be seen by other people posting anyways?

Or are they posted just after the poster rates a slate of comments? In that case, it doesn't do anything at all to stop stupid comments. It wouldn't be a captcha. It wouldn't do anything.

Oh, and isn't this great idea pretty much basically "Have a voting system for comments"? Don't people already have those?

God dammit the more I think about it the more I realize that it isn't even an idea. It's just a...a travesty all around. It wouldn't work.

I'm not native English speaker, so I didn't get what "soh cah toa" meant at first, and thought that was a name of some evil deity. Sounds Indonesian or something (Krakatau volcano and all that). So I thought that those guys at Los Alamos didn't make a nuclear bomb but a weapon based on something "from the other side". That seemed kinda funny. I also thought that adding to "the ignorant" person some ritual accessoires would be a nice touch. And everything is really much more boring. Bleh.

@Anon1035: "Guys, it is actually true that the inventors of the bomb considered it very likely the atmosphere of the entire planet would be ignited."

That's a bit of an overstatement. There was some concern that this might happen, but someone (Konopinski, I think) proved it couldn't happen even before the Trinity test. That didn't stop Fermi from jokingly taking bets about it moments before the test, though.

ok, so first new person joins the forum. they rate a few standard ones, get it right. (note that a bot could do this too, either from some form of heuristics, or just by pure chance - if its a reasonable number of questions, it's only a matter of time before a bot guesses right) they get told to enter some new sample ones, they think 'wtf, i'm not wasting my time on that' and type in some gibberish (or they're a bot, and they put in some coded-questions for their bot-brethren to pick up on). they dont get blocked, because they've already passed the up/downrating test.unless, of course, their samples are first up/downrated by the existing members of the forum. which, and forgive me if i'm wrong here, defeats the whole purpose. if existing people are having to read and interpret those messages, it renders the whole excercise pointless.

it makes no sense.randy has provided a solution that doesnt work to a problem that doesnt exist.

1) StickRandall fails to clarify how the comments are posted anyway. One can suppose they'll only be posted after they're rated constructive, but that means all the spammers need are several spambots rating each other's comments are constructive. The worst case scenario is that(as I thought at first), they only need to make a constructive comment to enter the system, and from there they'd be free to be spammy.

2) Look at that last panel! LOOK AT THAT! Randall still didn't realize that those bothersome things that he refuses to draw(faces) actually serve a function: to give expression to his characters. How can a punchline like that have any effect when the character is litteraly blank faced?

Summarizing: Randall was a dumbass, is still a dumbass, and will always be a dumbass.

I'm a bit confused; does the paradigm in 810 actually force the eventual development of only helpful comments by spambots? it doesn't suggest that comments with a negative "constructivity" rating get purged or anything; why would anyone care that their comment was rated poorly?

810 just screams "potentially a funny FFFFUUUU-esque comic" to me. Randy seems like that kind of person too. If he had done some ridiculously over-the-top face in the last panel, then it would have at least gotten the cuddlefish to force it as a meme.

So apparently Randall has never heard of "trolls". And he lives in a universe where nobody would ever spitefully vote down a constructive comment solely because they disagree with the content of the comment.

To be more interesting, why not take the latest xkcd from another angle? How could one MAKE that work?

Obviously, basing the entrance test entirely on a values question is pretty much establishing yourself as an elitist group with no interest in non-conforming ideas (something Randall would probably be wanting to make) but since we are relatively sane and not anti-social individuals how would you make a series of comments appear "constructive" in an objective way? Or is "constructive" as a quality strictly a subjective concept?

Maybe something like an advanced captcha where there's a slate of comments, some of them that read like something a normal human being would write like "Hah I think that would be cool" and then others that are pure buzzwords like "social media youtube oil crisis middle east" and the test is you have to pick the one that isn't normal sounding. To make it even more difficult for bots you could add random misspellings that make sense to a human but wouldn't respond to a dictionary attack.

Weeds out spambots, and maybe the people who speak mostly in buzzwords?

As I said on xkcdsuxredux, the plan outlined in #810 simply wouldn't work. The "constructive" nature of a particular comment is far too subjective, even for a person, to judge another poster by their appraisal of it. If you're only letting comments get posted that have received that sort of approval, then you're essentially letting the hoards of bots be your moderating team, an awful idea if there ever was one. (And as a one-time forum owner, I can promise you that bots are FAR more numerous than legitimate posters).

So, we have three possible outcomes:1) Bots rate all comments as constructive. Posts continue through as though unmoderated, and significantly more spam makes it through than a captcha would allow.2) Bots rate all comments as not constructive. The board grinds to a halt as all comments, regardless of their quality, are discarded before making it to the message board.3) Bots rate roughly half of the comments as constructive, and half as not constructive. The rating system fails, as all comments receive roughly the same rating (the hundreds of bots outweigh the few real users and render their ratings essentially meaningless). Comments are either posted or blocked as a fluke, and enough spam gets through to make it worthwhile. Again, a captcha would be more effective.

Randall, you suck again. See why you need an editor? If you'd have bounced this idea off of ONE PERSON you'd have seen how worthless it was!

I think the guy with hair is supposed to be Feynman, who must be distinguished from the other xkcd character because he has had several healthy long term relationships with women, and while not in said relationships was a total pimp.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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